This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
Technological development is leading to acceleration in growth of the volume of data available to individuals throughout the world. Storage and communication capabilities are exponentially increasing leading to a revolution in the way information is managed and accessed.
In particular, data is now shared as never before. Individual items of data will be copied many times over with all interested parties. Open networks are designed to facilitate this copying, while various security processes have been developed to restrict access. However, these approaches struggle to find the balance between users' needs, particularly when multiple users have a legitimate interest in a certain piece of data.
For example, when data such as a document is collaboratively created or edited, the conventional approach is for various versions of the document to be shared through various iterations of the editing process. This creates difficulties for version control, particularly where multiple users work on a document at the same time. Solutions have been proposed to allow real time collaborative editing, but these have not gained sufficient traction in the market to replace the document sharing approach, partly due to inefficiencies and counter-intuitive interfaces.
Even when a document is created by a single user, there is still a lack of flexibility in current arrangements for sharing that document. Either it is shared freely without any technical hindrance, in which case the original user loses all control of the document, or the user applies some kind of document security in which case document access by other parties is highly restricted. There is in effect a binary distinction between the user deciding to share a piece of data with another or deciding to prevent access to that data by the other user.
There is a need for greater flexibility in data sharing. At present, behaviours do not take full advantage of the technology available. In the scenario where a user wishes to share a piece of data with another but only temporarily, for example, this is still often achieved by providing a physical artefact carrying the data that can be later retrieved (one reason for the continuing use of paper in many environments). Alternatively, digital data on a single physical device is temporarily shared by sharing that physical device. One can imagine the scenario in which a user would like to show a friend a photograph, but does not necessarily want that friend to retain the photograph indefinitely. In practice, the camera or smartphone containing the image is simply physically handed between the parties.
Increasingly, individuals carry portable computing devices, such as smartphones or tablet computers, on their person. While wireless communications protocols such as Bluetooth have been developed to allow ready transfer of data between such devices, they do not account for the use scenarios in which control of the data shared is desired.
Ultimately, there remain a range of scenarios in which users' intuitive expectations about data ownership and control are not matched by the technological means available to them. Users by instinct adopt ad hoc approaches to overcome these hurdles, but this is inefficient, impractical and does not promote optimal collaboration between users.